> I hope at least firefox has a setting to permanently disable this feature.
I'd like to see all the sensors permissions lumped together behind a sufficiently scary name ("Permission to spy on you"?), off by default, and for the browser to enforce strict security requirements before it's even willing to prompt the user for the permissions the site's requested.
Web apps aren't going away, but we could have a better UI to enforce a separation between full-fat web apps with similar capabilities to native apps, and the rest of the web that's just trying to abuse those features for spying.
Well, currently switching off JS entirely is the single best way to block abusive web site behaviors, but there's obviously room for improvement. There are valid use cases for ordinary websites (as opposed to full-featured web apps) to use JavaScript, but that shouldn't by default extend to sensor APIs, messing with scrolling behavior, using unrestricted CPU time, or loading third-party scripts.
I'd like to see all the sensors permissions lumped together behind a sufficiently scary name ("Permission to spy on you"?), off by default, and for the browser to enforce strict security requirements before it's even willing to prompt the user for the permissions the site's requested.
Web apps aren't going away, but we could have a better UI to enforce a separation between full-fat web apps with similar capabilities to native apps, and the rest of the web that's just trying to abuse those features for spying.